I am here, at the end of it all, where landmass just runs out. Six months have delivered me to this spot. I’ve crossed deserts, summited snowy peaks, pushed my body to near breaking point and seen the inside of more police stations than is healthy. Three thousand miles across China, ten million footsteps and an amount of blisters that cannot be quantified. I never know what to expect at the end of a long journey, and now I recall why. There’s an overwhelming sense of calm, of relief. And always, a tinge of sadness. Behind me, the Hong Kong skyline begins to glow as night falls. For the second time in three years, I find myself finishing a journey, here, in the belly of the Pacific.
In 2010 I spent just over a year on a bicycle, setting off from New York City and arriving 14,000 miles later in Hong Kong. I was well and truly hooked; to life on the road, to adventure, to fitness and freewheeling and freedom. In Hong Kong at the end of that journey I rested up for a while with my friend Rob Lilwall. Rob too was no stranger to bicycles – in 2007 he flew to Siberia, and then spent the next three years cycling home to London via Papua New Guinea, Tibet and Afghanistan. He was now itching for a new adventure, and before I could hop on my plane back to London he’d pitched me a new idea - a walk from the Gobi desert to the South China Sea, through the heart of China. We would be fully self sufficient, and carry video cameras to shoot a TV show of the journey. Six months later, we boarded a plane to Mongolia…
It was mid-November when Rob and I arrived in the frontier town of Sainshand, with winter beginning to tighten it’s grip on the land. Dust kicked up by the wind obscured everything, but in fact there was little to see. South of here is home to the vast and empty expanse of the Gobi – the largest cold desert in the world outside of Antarctica.
We decided to pull a trailer loaded with all our supplies for the first two hundred miles to the Chinese border. Keeping our water from freezing was the big concern, and so we wrapped thirty large plastic bottles in locally bought fur-lined woman’s tights, put them in cardboard boxes and hoped for the best.
The fourteen-day crossing was punctuated by irregular snowstorms, causing the temperature to plummet to minus thirty. Those fur-lined women’s tights that insulated our water proved doubly useful when Rob hit upon the idea of wearing them ourselves at night in the tents. Very little can survive in a desert at this temperature, but there is a morbid beauty to the scene of endless tracts of rolling rocky wilderness and otherworldly sunsets. Throughout the long, cold days we strained our eyes constantly for telltales signs of the nomads – a goat here, a Bactrian camel there, a wisp of smoke escaping from a Ger on the horizon. Gers are the traditional nomadic homestead in Mongolia; the name in the local language means simply ‘home.’ Straight wooden struts form a circular shape, with fabric and sheep or goat’s wool packed around for warmth. Small and humble affairs, Gers provide dwelling for up to a third of the population of Mongolia. If we spotted one, we were inevitably invited in with a hospitality and warmth that blew us way. Herders with leathery faces shaped by a harsh life of extremes would cook us broths of fatty goat meat, and delight in letting us roll out our sleeping bags on the Ger floor. Unfortunately, with no common language we had to settle for gesticulating and the universal sounds of comedy to entertain each other – farting and burping.